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Friday, November 1, 2013

Ender's Game

Review by Matt Finley

I confess - in trying to persuade folks to take a peek at
Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender's Game, I’m not above invoking the name of
Britain’s favorite spell-casting tween, Harry bloody Potter. Maybe Rowling’s Hogwarts
never saw as many harsh, nude shower room beatings as Card’s low-orbit battle
school, but both stories share some of the same dog-eared coming-of-age
archetypes – a shy, preternaturally talented young boy sent to a specialized
academy where he hones his gifts while nurturing friendships and rivalries with
a motley roster of similarly skilled pupils.

Granted, these are two of 10,000 stories that tread this
course (not to mention that Harry’s shotgunning butter beers while Ender is
groomed for military genocide), but thanks to writer/director Gavin Hood’s
(TSOTSI) cinematic adaptation of ENDER’S GAME, I’ve got another point of comparison:
Both stories were adapted into reverent, enjoyable film properties that diluted
just enough narrative and dulled precisely enough emotional impact to make the
prospect of experiencing (or re-experiencing) the source material a welcome
task.

Hood opens the film with a maddeningly cliché expositional
voiceover that explains how a race of grody-to-the-max insectoids – the Formics
– attacked the earth, igniting an interstellar conflict for which the
International Fleet has begun recruiting gifted children for their superior
creativity in devising combat strategy. Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), the
youngest member in a family of military flunk outs, quickly distinguishes
himself as a brilliant tactician in the grueling battle school where students
are turned against one another in competition to become fleet commanders against
the Formic swarm.

Butterfield is good enough to pull off Ender’s
waifish-yet-fiery wunderkind, so it’s a shame that the rest of the cast are
painted into bland character types. It isn’t enough that Ender is openly attempting
to find a middle way between the weepy sympathy of his sister, Valentine
(Abigail Breslin), and the sociopathic violence of brother, Peter (Jimmy
Pinchak). Hood makes sure his military mentors – callous grunt Colonel Graff
(Harrison Ford) and matronly psychologist Major Anderson (Viola Davis), - personify
a tiresomely similar duality.

Ender’s classmates, meanwhile, fall into one of three categories:
friend, bully, or extra, save for the one female student, Petra (Hailee
Steinfeld), whose friendship with Ender thankfully avoids the swooning,
lovesick canoodling of most popular contemporary YA fare.

The sci-fi trappings, from the mandible-snicking Formics to
the skin-hugging battle suits are borderline boilerplate, but rendered lovingly
enough to create a visually engaging future world. I felt sorry for Hood, his
film is being released right on the heels of GRAVITY and all. Taken without a
comparative context, ENDER’S GAME's zero-grav battleroom sequences are gorgeously
rendered bits of imaginative action.

(By the way … I hate to make yet another Harry Potter
comparison, and I know next to nothing about sports, but both Quidditch and the
battleroom game are designed such that teams compete against each other to
score points, but once the object of the game is completed – the catching of
the snitch and the entering of the enemy’s gate, respectively – all points are
nullified and the winner is determined based on that one thing. Now Whackbat –
there’s a sport.)

As much as I seem to be slagging Hood’s vision, the sheer
undertaking of ENDER’S GAME as a PG-13 blockbuster was a courageous venture.
While current boycotts of the film are directed at Orson Scott Card’s recent incendiary
hate-speech against gays, the book itself is an object of contention for its
portrayals of violence, and – some allege – the lack of moral responsibility
that Ender demonstrates for his actions. Hood’s approach is to highlight Ender’s
empathy, while also demonstrating that the emotional understanding gleaned from
this attribute can be shaped into a deadlier weapon than even hatred or fear.

By taking a much more transparent moral stand against war
than Card, some of the story’s overarching emotional impact is dulled, but
Ender’s ultimate fate is no less affecting.

I hear a lot of grumbling from folks who have grown tired of
“Chosen One” narratives. And I get it. There’s not much suspense to be mined
from a story in which a moth-eaten prophesy or apoplectic oracular vision one
chapter in reveals that our protagonist is predestined to overcome his dark
foil. It’s in this regard that Ender Wiggin differs from Harry Potter and all
the other augury-engineered heroes who chug along their pre-destined paths,
bearing their inventoried burdens like so many rusted freights. Yes, ENDER’S
GAME is about a hero who’s chosen. Even a hero who seems destined to succeed. But just as empathy can be wielded as a blade,
so, too, can victory be suffered as a wound. (3 out of 4 Stars)